1 Time to log off the internet for 24 hours.

2 Heh. I like World of Warships April Fools joke better.  Wonderduck probably will too.  Which reminds me, I'm having trouble getting to his site...

3 Ubu, yeah, a toy ship bathtub mode is a great April Fool's joke.  Even better if it's real.  But that's a lot of work.

4 You could say I like it, yes...

If I remember correctly, two or three years ago, TT had a fake "The FBI has noticed you, you pirate!" page on April Fool's...

5 Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 now runs Linux.

Except that it's real.

6 That permits you to run all the great Linux applications that haven't been ported to Windows yet, such as... I'll get back to you.

7 GREP and SED, for instance... (And how could you forget AWK?)

8 I have binaries for all of those on this Win7 machine.  (Well, I have gawk, not vanilla awk.)  Dunno how people live without them. 

9 Google "Mic Drop" April Fools gag goes horribly wrong.

1

Another thing that was very surprising is the relative lack of fan service. With a character like Mai, obviously deliberately designed to attract audience members, it would have been really easy for the director to start pandering. But although they did do the "limbo" scene, and the hot springs episode, they generally steered clear of outright pandering. For instance, despite all the flying kicks and other acrobatics that Mai does in the series when she's fighting while wearing a miniskirt, I don't remember a single panty shot.

It's another example of director discipline.

2 Two of which are very desirable?  You've been watching too many re-runs of Love Hina.  I'd take the asocial redhead with the headphones before going after the domestic abuser sempai. I might even wait on the loli to grow up.  (Apologies if either is who you meant in the first place...)

3 I was thinking of Mai (the blonde) and Reina (long brown hair).

4

Right-- the violent one that abuses him, and the cute, nice one with the Grade-A zettai ryoiki.  Difficult choice, that.   

5

Mai being seriously abusive is something that only happens in the early episodes. It was pretty much in there because the director knew some viewers were expecting it, like the fan service. After he had his audience hooked (he hoped) he could fade it out.

Mai's attitude towards Haruhiko changes somewhat in ep 3 and changes a lot in ep 11. It isn't really tsundere (because they never become cuddly or romantic) but it's similar.

But yeah, if I myself was choosing one it would be Reina.

6 Tsunderes aren't really that bad. Not the original (Lum) concept. They're just "Large print for the reading impaired" emotion girls. Unless you're a total moron or cad, (Ataru, IOW.) it's much easier to stay on the good side of a tsundere than an average girl, because she'll let you know when she's mad, instead of doing a slow burn. And she'll let you know when she's happy with you, too. 

I ought to know, I married one. 

Tsunderes got the bad rep when later writers perverted the concept, perhaps not understanding it, or maybe just finding a guy getting beat up by a pretty girl funny. Lum only electrocutes Ataru when he's earned it. Naru sends Keitaro to the moon at the least excuse, and never gives him a chance to explain.
Totally different concept, IMO, but the both get called tusundere.

7 Thus the obvious breakdown into "tsundere:default=tsun" and "tsundere:default=dere", as seen on TVTropes and elsewhere.  

1 I think that last one might not technically "destroy" the planet, but I've got my doubts any higher life forms would survive.

2 "A girl that large would change planetary orbits in the whole solar system."

She would also collapse into a sphere under her own gravity.

...you can see it starting to happen already.

(twice!)

Maybe we can get her to leave us one hair ribbon to use as a space elevator?

3 Like many fetishes, this one has to ignore the fact that it's impossible. (Though the reason varies from one fetish to the next.)

4 Yeah, even the bigger earthbound ones should be leaving much deeper footprints (waist-deep or so?)  The same as should happen for non-fetish giant robots. (Or the non-non-fetish giant robots in Godannar & Kirameki Project.) 

I assume whatever magic boosted her to star-size is keeping her her-shaped.  I just wanted to make the "spheres" joke.

5 Non-fetish?  Godannar?  You're joking, right?   They had high heels and breasts!

6 Ubu, did you miss the double negative?

7  Whiff.

1 In the battle arena game World of Warships, Iowa is ranked one Tier lower than Yamato, with a somewhat-spec-based version of the never-built Montana class ranked on the same Tier as Yamato.  I think it's done more for balancing the game based on how they want it played, though.  Some of the ships have conceptual similarities to to their real-life counterparts, while others are slotted in where they're needed.

2

That was another question I was going to ask.

In terms of game balance and attracting international players, they can't really tell the truth: American ships by the end of the war were better than anyone else's, not to mention far more numerous.

But this isn't a history lesson, it's a game. It's more important that it be fun than that it be accurate. (That applies to KanColle too.)

3 I got curious so I looked it up.
Compared to Yamato, Iowa is:
20-30% cheaper to operate. (Which is a major, major factor in KanColle, where running Yamato and Musashi all the time will bankrupt you.) About 10% less firepower with equipment, and slightly shorter range. (Not a big deal.) 5% less HP. 10% less armor. Is "High Speed" instead of "Low Speed", which means you can use her for things you can't use Yamato for. Has a much higher luck stat, for accuracy and dodging. 10% better AA.
All in all, Yamato is the more powerful ship in most cases, but Iowa is an extraordinary asset and something any player would want.
As for how she compares to the other ships in the game, she's probably slightly lower than Bismarck's maximum upgraded form, which carries torpedo tubes and so does slightly more damage, and is also much cheaper to operate.
If I had to rank the battleships in the game right now, it would be 
Yamato/Musashi Bismarck Iowa Everyone Else

4 (OT other than the fact that Mr. Den Beste mentioned James Dunnigan.)

A classmate of mine and I had beta-tested one of SPIs games back in late 1970s (in fact, it was https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4207/kharkov).  I never met James Dunnigan nor did I meet  Redmond Simonsen (despite his dying in near-by Garland, TX) while at West Point in the end of the 1970s despite a subscription to S&T and buying quite a few wargames.  I rather regret that to this day.

OT by all measures: Hmm.  By some strange quirk of fate, I see that one each Stephen Den Beste does not have a page of his own, despite being quoted in one or more pages.

5

My given name is "Steven", not "Stephen".

And please avoid OT comments in future.

6 Please accept my sincere apologies, Mr. Den Beste.

I leave it to your imagination on how my last name has been mispronounced (many times willfully so, especially as a plebe) and misspelled over the years.  I was careful on your family name but less so on your given one. 

I'll note that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_progressivism has the incorrect spelling of your given name, which does not excuse my getting it wrong in any way. 

7 I'm going to quibble for accuracy's sake.  I apologize in advance...

1) No others (battleships) were ever built after that...

HMS Vanguard was launched in November 1944 and commissioned in 1946.  She's truly the "final battleship," though she could never hope to stand up to an Iowa.  She had less armor than an Iowa, but it was arguably better arranged and better quality (there's a world of debate about that).  Her only clear advantage was that she was a better sea-going ship. 

2) Yamato and Musashi never fired their main guns against an enemy.

Yamato most certainly did at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  Musashi did fire her main guns at US aircraft (using sanshiki anti-aircraft rounds, one of which actually disabled Turret 1 in the process). 

A few years back, I tried to write about an Iowa-vs-Yamato fight, and found that I couldn't make it interesting.  I just couldn't come up with a non-ridiculous scenario where the Yamato could legitimately win.

8 I didn't realize they had anti-aircraft shells for their big guns.

9

Saying that "American ships at the end of the war were better" is true, but also more than a bit deceptive.

By 1945 there were only three nations still building warships: the US, the UK, and the Japanese. And the US industrial might was far greater than the UK and Japanese combined.

The Japanese in particular had a terrible bottleneck on raw materials because the American submarine blockade had finally begun to really hurt them.

And in the case of the British, they were simply used up after 6 years of all-out war.

The French weren't building ships because they had only recently been liberated. The Italians weren't building ships because there was no point in doing so after they changed sides. The Germans spent all their naval building effort on submarines. And the USSR wasn't building ships because ships would be useless for the war they were fighting.

I think Canada was still building ships but not all that many just because the population was so small. (Same comment about Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth.)

So it's not really a fair comparison. If the other industrial powers had been able to build ships in 1945 the way they had been in 1935, the only real advantage the Americans would have had is sheer volume. (Which is still significant, of course.)

10

HMS Vanguard was not even the last battleship completed - Jean Bart was (Due to the Fall of France interrupting her construction.).  If 'built' also includes 'battleships under construction but were never finished,' we can include both ILLINOIS and KENTUCKY - especially the latter, which Ernie King placed a priority on the construction of.  Had the war lasted another year, KENTUCKY would have been completed.

The armor issue is tricky.  The standard British armor was probably better than the standard US armor (The USN did realize the issues beforehand and had developed better armor, but the Pacific War began before they could put the new armor into production and it was decided that production was a higher priority over introducing something new.), and the KGV (Which the Vanguard was based on.) probably carried it better.  The USN could afford to use their armor plate much more freely than anyone else, though.

The San Shiki shells were for use on all the IJN battleships, to provide a 'shotgun shell' anti-aircraft defense.  They were much more effective in the bombardment role, as Kongo used them as during the Guadalcanal campaign.

 

11 I found this to be a pretty good comparison, especially since it includes factors like fire control:

http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm

Kurita had more of an edge over Taffy 3 than Oldendorf had over the Southern Force the previous night, and yet, he performed abysmally in comparison, wasting precious hours against a handful of tiny escorts.  The biggest difference?  I'd argue that it was our radar-controlled guns and almost magical electro-mechanical shell and torpedo fire control computers, compared to the Japanese colored smoke bombs in their shells.

If Halsey had split TF 34 off as he had suggested, it would have been a night battle between Washington+Alabama+5xCC+DDs vs. 4xBB (including Yamato)+6xCC+2xCL+11xDD.  At night, blocking the exit to a strait, with fire control radar and probably the best BB crew in the fleet (WA), I think we still would have won, although the DDs on both sides could have proved decisive with their torpedoes (as had Oldendorf's DDs).

Now, if Halsey had detached Iowa and his own New Jersey to hold the straits... that would have gone down in history.

12 The Iowa has first been introduced  in the PSVita computer game Kancolle Kai (by clearing the game on hard difficulty or higher). She's scheduled to debut in the browser game in Spring 2016 or later, so her stats in the wiki might be different for comparison with the Yamato. Her lines sound like this.
The ship that the Iowa sank, the Kotori, is in the game, so it'll be interesting to see how the 4-koma handles their meeting. 
In game, the San Shiki shells are effective against installations, so a lot of battleships have them.

13

Re: B's and the picture -- how could you forget "babe"? 

 

The armor issue is tricky. The standard British armor was probably better than the standard US armor (The USN did realize the issues beforehand and had developed better armor, but the Pacific Warbegan before they could put the new armor into production and it was decided that production was a higher priority over introducing something new.)

 In WOWs, they claim that the Iowa and Montana class (which they fail to mention was never built) have a unique armor type and arrangement that makes them superior.  Their research could be a little wonky, or it could be game balance.  

In reality, on the eve of war, the US was commissioning the Colorado class, and debating the Iowa vs. the Montana.  The Montana class was seen as the answer to the Yamato; achieving a superior throw weight via 4x3 16" gun turrets as opposed to Yamato's 3x3 18" turrets.  After the BB vs. CV argument got decisively settled at Pearl Harbor, the USN decided on the faster Iowas as escorts for the carriers; which they could also make it through the Panama Canal.  Montana BBs couldn't.

14 They were much more effective in the bombardment role, as Kongo used them as during the Guadalcanal campaign.

CXT, do you have any references for this?  I see this claim bandied about on the interwebs, but with nothing to point at and say "I found this information here."  My various books on Guadalcanal mention nothing about them being used in the bombardment of Henderson, so if you've got something, please let me know!

15

CXT, do you have any references for this?

Richard B. Frank's Guadalcanal has a footnote, on one of the pages describing 'The Bombardment,' which breaks down types and numbers of shells fired by Kongo and Haruna.  Kongo was the only one of the pair that fired the Sanshiki.

Kongo's TROM at Combined Fleet also says she fired the Sanshiki during the bombardment, and explains that only Kongo received '...them before departure because there are not enough available for both battleships.'  Since Combined Fleet uses Japanese sources (Both primary and secondary.) as well as Western sources for their TROMs, I believe it is safe to assume they are correct.

Re: "The ship that the Iowa sank, the Kotori.."

It should be 'Katori' that was sunk by IOWA.

Re: "In reality, on the eve of war, the US was commissioning the Colorado class..."

The COLORADOs were older than that.  Perhaps you are referring to the NORTH CAROLINA and SOUTH DAKOTA classes?

"The Montana class was seen as the answer to the Yamato; achieving a superior throw weight via 4x3 16" gun turrets as opposed to Yamato's 3x3 18" turrets."

I doubt the Yamatos played that big of a factor in the design of the MONTANAs (Especially since the USN only had good intelligence on the size and armament of the Yamatos only after the MONTANAs had been officially canceled.).  The MONTANAs originally came from a desire by the USN for a battleship whose armor could withstand the 'heavy 2700lb AP rounds being introduced for the 16" batteries of the fast battleships.  The increase in the size of the MONTANAs meant they could fit a greater battery, and design studies show that the 16"/50 was the best option of the three gun sizes considered.  However, by the time the orders were placed, US shipyard capacity was already fully loaded (If not necessarily producing at full efficiency.) and led to their suspension.  The eclipse of the battleship, material shortages, and higher priorities for other ships meant they were an easy item to cut.

Also, since the MONTANAs were design contemporaries of the MIDWAYs, it was accepted from the first requirements that they would not fit through the existing locks in Panama, and that did not appear to be a consideration in their suspension/cancellation.  There as consideration for adding another, wider set of locks at the canal, so the 'wider than the Panama Canal' was probably less a concern to the General Board and BuShips at the time than it would now appear.  

16 Yeah, Frank has a couple of other places where he describes the type 3s being used in bombardment operations, including (if I recall correctly) the Hiei popping a few off against ships as they were loaded when the fleets opened up on each other. I'll check it out when I get home.

17 Duck, sent you some excerpts in a Reddit message. Might write up a post on it so we have somewhere to discuss without taking things off topic.

And Yamato did participate at Leyte Gulf, but not very much; she dodged some torpedoes from Taffy 3's escorts and came out of formation, and never really got back in range. But it's absolutely arguable that they were a negative - too capital for committing back when they could have actually influenced the war.

18 The bombardment of Henderson air base is described in a lot of detail on the Japanese side.  "Four Pillars of Fire", a book about the Kongou class battleships, goes into great detail on it, as do any number of other sources.  "Sea of Rage", the book about the sinking of the Hiei, talks about it too.  Neither of these books are English language, though.
According to that book, when the Kongou was firing her type three shells, the area where they loaded the shells (I'm at a loss as to what it's called, it's been a while since I read the book) got so hot that at least one man died of heatstroke.  That's how many shells they were firing, and how fast.
That section of Four Pillars ends with the observation that the only real affect of the the Henderson air field bombardment was to teach the Americans that battleship bombardment of airbases was an effective way to shut them down. The Japanese never managed to successfully replicate the strike on Henderson, but the US would go on to use that tactic on several Japanese airbases.

19

Perhaps it would be effective against Japanese airfields. It wasn't all that effective against Henderson, because of how the Americans made their airfields in the Pacific.

Part of the supplies landed on the island were big steel mats. After bulldozers cleared a runway and leveled it, the entire thing was covered by those mats, which were welded together. They had lots of little holes in them to allow water to drain away and to reduce the weight and cost, and the result was even better than if it had been paved.

If it got bombed, and a bomb hit the runway and made a big crater, they would use cutting torches to cut off the mats which had been damaged. Then they would bring in dirt to fill in the whole, tamp it down to make it solid, and then fill the area back in with new undamaged mats which would be welded to the existing structure. The whole thing was very fast and the SeaBees could get the airfield back into operation really quickly (less than a week, depending on just how sustained the bombardment was).

I think the greater effect would be to supplies and men. The airfield itself wasn't really a good target.

Later in the war when they were attacking Japanese airfields, the B-25 Strafer was particularly effective, and a lot more practical.

20 Lack of adequate construction units and equipment plagued the Japanese through the war. They simply didn't have many of them, they were manned with the odds 'n' sods because it was an extremely low-prestige position, and they had very little equipment to work with. They managed a lot when it came to defensive fortifications, but improvising up airfields is a lot harder.

The US didn't really have ENOUGH construction troops relative to the demand, but what they had were better trained and much better equipped. This meant the US could consistently get facilities built and repaired faster than the Japanese expected.

But the Japanese weren't really intending to destroy the airfield (or rather, I'm sure they'd have been happy to do so, but they weren't counting on it). What they were hoping to do was destroy US fighter and bomber strength on the ground so that they could reinforce and supply Guadalcanal without taking losses from ground-based air attack; this would force the US carriers to support Guadalcanal more closely, pulling them into range of Japanese operations where they could be located and attacked. They were also hoping that a reinforced and well-supplied Japanese force could push the US off Henderson.

Didn't work out that way, and a good part of the reason is that Japan wasn't able to build closer air bases in time to do any good (they did actually build one, but it too got bombarded, heh.)

21

The official history of the Navy's construction effort during WW2 is more equivocal about the importance of Marston mats at Henderson Field - often times, any damage inflicted by the Japanese on the matting was repaired AFTER the aircrafts had taken off (Yes, even B-17s - one B-17 was scrubbed from launch because it ran over a damaged mat and cut the tires.).  Not all the airfields on Guadalcanal and not all the runways at Henderson had the matting before they were used.  It was very useful, but had its' limitations.  It definitely did not take hours to fix.

Naval bombardment was not useful in destroying an airfield.  The Japanese discovered that at Guadalcanal, and the USN discovered that during the later stages of the Solomons Campaign.  The damage done would appear impressive, but Japanese airfields that American cruiser-destroyer groups 'devastated' in a bombardment would often be operable and operating within a day.  The Combined Fleet staff concluded that even a battleship bombardment like what Kongo and Haruna conducted, could suppress operations from an airfield for at most 24 hours - which proved entirely optimistic.  Note that airstrikes also had the same issues.

What naval bombardment was useful against an airfield was as part of a sustained interdiction campaign.  Constant and sustained interdiction of an airfield by fire was far more useful than a single massive effort aimed at destroying it.  That is why it was important for the Japanese to get heavy artillery to Guadalcanal and hold locations where they could emplace the artillery to fire upon Henderson Field, and why it was important for the Americans to deny the Japanese both.

Lack of mechanized construction equipment was a major disadvantage suffered by the Japanese through-out the war (The IJN's first mechanized construction unit lost its' equipment set when the transport carrying it was torpedoed by submarine.), but the Marines would not have been able to finish building Henderson Field if it was not for the surprisingly impressive amount of heavy equipment they captured from the Japanese.

22

When the B-25 strafers attacked Japanese airfields, damage to the runway wasn't the main point. What they mainly wanted to do was damage or destroy aircraft, not to mention killing and wounding as many men as possible

The bombs they dropped, known as "parafrags", would not have substantially damaged airfields. As fragmention bombs, they would be particularly effective at killing men, and doing damage to any nearby aircraft which weren't defended by berms, as well as buildings and vehicles. And, of course, massed .50 caliber gunfire could waste anything that wasn't armored like a tank.

The other advantage of the B-25 strafers was that they could keep attacking any target within range as long as they had supply.

Naval bombardment was at best a "once in a while" thing because warships couldn't hang around within gunnery range without risking air or submarine counterattack. They had to dart in at night, shoot, and dart back out again.

And, of course, a squadron of B-25 strafers cost a lot less than a CA, let along several CAs.

23

The other advantage of the B-25 strafers was that they could keep attacking any target within range as long as they had supply.

How many B-25 would you need to maintain constant interdiction of the airfields?  I know full well that a B-25 attack could be devastating, but it suffers from the same issue as a naval task group conducting a bombardment - short loiter time.  In order for a B-25 to work at suppressing operations at an airfield, you need a constant stream of them visiting the airfield, or the B-25 being part of the sustained effort.  Otherwise the airfield you hit today will be ready for operation by daybreak tomorrow, if not sooner.

There was not a single action which caused the Japanese to abandon the airfield at Munda, for example - it was the steady and sustained stream of attacks of all kinds which led to the Japanese deciding that air operations from Munda was not worth the effort.

24

It's not about interdiction. It's about attrition. You're not trying to put the airfield completely out of business in one or a small number of attacks, because you can't.

You're trying to reduce its effectiveness so that it makes a declining contribution to the war.

Every enemy aircraft you destroy on the ground is one you don't have to fight in the air. Enemy fuel and ammunition that you destroy on the ground can't be used to bomb you in return.

That's good enough. More would be nice but in war you have to make compromises.

25

It's not about interdiction. It's about attrition. You're not trying to put the airfield completely out of business in one or a small number of attacks, because you can't.

Sometimes you ARE trying to put the airfield out of business, or at least force the bad guys to being unable to use the airfield, as your primary objective, and not trying cost him personnel and material (Though that would be nice.).  Attrition can do that, but interdiction is a more useful way to doing so.  Sometimes, the objectives of your operation means interdiction is more useful.

We saw both examples during the Guadalcanal campaign - Southwest Pacific B-17s routinely hit Rabaul and the airfields around it, inflicting attrition losses on Japanese air units and their logistical infrastructure, while the Cactus Air Force went after Rekata Bay for the same reason.  On the other hand, when the Japanese began building the airfield at Munda, which would have increased Japanese air capabilities against Guadalcanal, US objectives hinged on shutting down the airfield as much as possible to prevent the Japanese from using it all.  While destroying Japanese aircraft and material and killing the personnel would have been nice, the main objective was to prevent the operations from the field - but the main purpose was to keep the field shut down as much as possible.

26 Henderson Field (or maybe the ships sunk attacking it) is personified as the Airfield Princess in game.
The Iowa herself hasn't been in the browser game, but her 16-inch Triple Gun Mount Mk.7 main gun was a reward in December. A player can equip it on any battleship, including the Yamato and the Bismark. In the 4-koma, the Maikaze, Katori, and Nowaki were really unsettled. (A comment claims that "Amusingly, both Katori and Maikaze were sunk by 5-inch shells from the BB's seconday guns because they were too small to justify using the main guns.")

27 I don't know how realistic World of Warships is (I know they make ahistorical decisions based on play balance), but anyone trying to hit a destroyer with a BB's main guns is just wasting their time, or desperate to stop an impending torp launch.  At close range, the turrets are too slow, and firing times too long.

1 Just a quick note regarding influence:

I gave up on this show after you mentioned Olga's partnership with Lucifer. I had difficulty with this to begin with, but I tried about 8 episodes because you found something serviceable at the outset. You were wrong, and therefore you are a terrible person.

On the other hand, I would never have tried Galko had it not been mentioned by a wonderful commenter. You are super, and should be lauded as such.

Because this is the internet, there is no in-between emotional state. There's a German word for this, I suspect.

SchadenPutzenScwhartzWeissenPanzerFaust?

2 You need to get out more.

1 Quibble: the Romans, at least, were iron-age (though pre-industrial.) Based on their military tactics they were probably early medieval, post-Gothic-invasion.

2

My assumption is that they were bronze age when they came through the gate and learned about iron and steel afterwards.

Otherwise I can't explain why, after maybe a thousand years, they haven't advanced more. Mimoza told us that humans were the most recent arrivals, and we know that now there are millions of them. Enough so that 120,000 men were killed fighting the JSDF at Arnus.

Those were all regular army from the Empire and surrounding kingdoms. If collectively they could maintain an army that large, the population behind it that furnishes the men and money and supplies must be vastly larger.

3 I'd expect a variation on that, where the Japanese scientists are cooperating with the mages. I mean, let's face it, your average physicist, given incontrovertible evidence of magic, would sacrifice any random body part to learn how it works.

Meanwhile the mages are faced with evidence that knowledge of Japanese physics enables to to do much more powerful magic.

They'd both crawl across broken glass to keep in contact...

4 It's pretty easy to understand why they didn't advance more - magic exists.

Take a society where only a fraction of the population is even exposed to reading and education. From those, take a significant percentage and tell them "you should study magic, which will let you throw fireballs and call lightning and fly". The result: damned few people with the smarts to do engineering and the inclination to bother.

There's plenty of research going on, but mages do magic research and get solutions for mages. Most of them aren't going to spend time on the kind of things that would benefit mundane society. (For example, no guns, not even the concept of guns, though even a fairly crappy mage could design one...)

5

 

In the Roman Empire there were two kinds of engineers. Military engineers worked for the Army and built field works and fortresses and siege engines of various kinds.

And Civil Engineers built buildings, roads, sewer systems, bridges, and aquaducts. That's where the name "civil engineer" comes from; it's a translation of the Latin term.

Neither concerned themselves much with metallurgy, but they both needed good metals, for tools (for instance). Plus the Military engineers (and the Army in general) needed metals for weapons.

Among other advances, Civil engineers discovered and perfected concrete. They also learned a lot about mathematics (despite the horrible impediment of Roman Numerals) and were able to design structures which still stand, 1800 or more years later.

One of the most amazing is Pont du Gard, which was part of an aquaduct which supplied water to Nemausus (modern Nimes). 20 or 30 years ago I saw an article about it in Scientific American, where some modern civil engineers analyzed the design using modern tools and knowledge. The fact that it still stood more than 1900 years after it was built was remarkable, and the usual assumption until then was that the Roman Civil Engineers had massively overdesigned it.

But the modern analysis found that in fact it had about the same kind of overdesign that modern Civil Engineers tend to use.

The Empire has a very advanced civil engineering technology; we can tell that from some of the scene shots of the Capital and from indoor images at various points of one or another palace. They had glass windows, which was a very advanced technology. And their metals were generally excellent. Armor for horses is not a primitive technology.

None of these things are affected by magic one way or another. Magic can be of use during construction, for instance to clear away brush and rubble, but the actually design and building would have to be done the old fashioned way, by strong hands and backs.

I don't think magic is the answer to why they hadn't advanced further. I think the answer is "gods". Science in our timeline finally begins to bloom and expand once a mechanistic view of the universe becomes more common and acceptable (i.e. doesn't get you burned at the stake). With the assumption that the universe is findamentally mechanistic, ruled by immutable laws, you begin to make progress.

That isn't possible in the Empire's universe because there really are gods; they're not mythical. And they select small number of humans and give them super powers and amazing weapons and task them with maintaining control and preventing things from going out of control. Rory talks about this in the manga and hints that one thing the Apostles have been doing is to stamp out technologies which the Gods think might be disruptive. Get too creative and Rory or someone like her shows up and slaughters you.

6 So, basically this world is the gods' play room. They bring in some new toys once in a while to mix it up, and even let the occasional toy ascend to their status, but you don't let the leggos advance to the point where they might challenge you.

The Romans did some amazing things, but there's a certain degree of survivor bias here; Any shoddy work they did is long gone. You'll see the same thing when house hunting; If you see a 50 year old house, or better a 100 year old one, you'll be impressed with how well built it is. It's easy to forget that it being well built is the only reason you got to see it, and think they built them all that way back then.

7

The biggest problem with immortality is boredom. You might be right that the Gods open the GATE and introduce new races every once in a while just for novelty value.

8 Only problem I have with that is, well... if you've been trying to repress progress and disruption for millennia, then opening a portal to -Japan- ain't consistent with prior policy. (Of course that policy doesn't have to be universal. You can have gods trying to stimulate progress, or simple amusement, and other gods running around trying to stamp it out...)

Which is also interesting, because Rory emphatically doesn't stamp it out. On the other hand, she does not characterize Emroy as a "good" god and emphatically not as a "nice" one...

Also, I'm not sure that I buy the "there are gods so they don't believe in science". That's not consistent with the mages that we see, who DO believe in science! They're aware that there are "true principles" by which the world operates, and specifically generate magical effects by warping those principles via magic, right? Lelei immediately recognizes that by refining her understanding of the "true principles", i.e. physics, she can make her magic more effective. That's not the obvious conclusion if you don't already have at least the concept of science; if you chalk it all up to understanding the will of god(s) then how does physics help with that?

At the same time, I can see the mages believing this (because it's fundamental to their magic) but not sharing that with the general population (hey, mysteries of the art.)

9

It may be that when the gods decide to open the gate again, they don't know what they'll get, what they'll connect to.

And just to clear things up a bit, here's the part of the manga that talks about this:

It isn't so much that the gods are trying to stop progress; it's more like bonsai where they're trying to control the growth so as to maintain a pleasing result.

10

Of course, "pleasing" is in the eye of the beholder and it's entirely possible that the gods themselves disagree with one another about what is pleasing.

It's also provable that "pleasing" doesn't necessarily mean "peaceful". Emroy, in particular, is pleased by battles since he is the god of war, death, crime, and insanity.

The hands of the gods are the twelve apostles who roam the planet doing whatever they do, presumably things that satisfy their respective patron gods. And it would seem that each patron god can communicate to their own apostle. So Rory has hooked up with the JSDF, and I assume that if Emroy didn't approve of that Rory would know it soon enough. Clearly Emroy doesn't disapprove of what Rory has been doing with Itami.

I get the impression that Emroy and Hardy are not... shall we say... in sync. Hardy's apostle Giselle woke the dragon and bred it to create two more, whereas Emroy's apostle Rory helped kill all three of them.

So the situation with the deities is obviously complex.

But we can't discount simple boredom as a motivating factor. The arrival of the Japanese is the single most interesting and complicating event of the last thousand years, possibly even longer. Irrespective of the consequences their technology may bring in the long run, for gods who are bored out of their minds the arrival of the Japanese has been great stuff.

11 Russian rule of thumb was that a population of 1,000,000 is necessary to raise a wartime division. Squeezing anything beyond that is and the rear line supply will nosedive.

12

I believe that number, though that's for a 20th Century division including hundreds of trucks at at least dozens of tanks and hundreds of tons of munitions and fuel and other supplies. For Roman-era legions, the ratio is probably a bit lower; the limiting factors are going to be tax revenue and just coming up with that many men without bleeding the entire population dry and causing a reproductive collapse. (I'm thinking of something like what nearly happened in the UK following WWI.)

In the case of the Special Territory, it's even more than the 120,000 that were killed in two battles at Arnus. There's also all the guy the Empire lost in Tokyo, killed or captured, and even with that, the Empire has been able to reconstitute its army since the battles at Arnus. So the human population alone must be upwards of twenty million. Possibly way beyond that.

13 By way of comparison, the US in WWII had a population of 170 million and put 8 million men under arms in all branches.  This was with (almost) full mechanization, however.  There were 100 Army divisions (plus six Marine--and a few numbers were skipped); however some of those were training or cadre divisions.
Of course, divisions weren't exactly 10,000 men either; old "square" divisions had about 12-13,000, whereas tank divisions were smaller. 

14 Could Hardy be behind the opening of the Gate this time?  He's been playing a lot of games behind the scenes, it seems.

15

Rory has dropped a snide comment that suggests that she thinks it was Hardy who did it. But she might be wrong. There's really too much we don't know about it for us to be speculating at that level. (Of course, we can speculate about anything, but our chance of being right is no better than random.)

Also, Hardy is female. That was definitely confirmed in the encounter with Giselle.

1 Every fox-spirit character I've ever seen had hair ranging in color from light brown to white. Blonde is typical. Often, as in Wagaya no Oinari-sama,  what sex a fox assumes in humanesque form is a matter of convenience and whim, not biological determinism.

2 As trickster spirits, foxes can assume any form.  Unless they're the comic-relief character... then you get someone like Shippou from Inuyasha, who can look like anyone or anything as long as he still has his bushy tail.

I wonder if the idea that "dyeing your hair a lighter color is something that delinquents and criminals do" is related to the image of trickster kitsune spirits with light-colored hair?

3 2nd to last isn't a loli?

4

I suppose it depends on your point of view. (A flat chest does not necessarily a loli make.)

5 Also, I think that's one of the pictures I picked up before I changed the search criterion.

6 "(A flat chest does not necessarily a loli make.)"

Being married to an 80 lbs soaking wet filipina, of that I am quite certain. But I think that one qualifies in other ways, too.